Developer Hiring Blog

In the past, talent acquisition professionals were viewed as internal consultants. If an urgent position became vacant, C-level executives looked to these teams to “take care of it.” What did this mean for recruiters and HR leaders? In many cases, the expectation was that they would post job listings online, find a few candidates, and hire the right person for the job within a matter of days.

Of course, this is an incredibly reductive view of the work that your team does, especially when it comes to hiring developers. But how can HR leaders communicate the full value of their talent acquisition strategies to their executives? Here are a few points to keep in mind.

When you’re looking to backfill a developer role or two, it’s easy to understand the importance of finding and hiring qualified candidates. But as your company continues to evolve, your priority won’t be to replace programmers. Now, the challenge lies in creating a developer hiring strategy that helps your organization hit its goals today and well into the future.

As a talent acquisition leader, you and the team that you manage have an opportunity to support your company’s growth. According to Robert Half, one-fifth of CIOs in the United States plan on growing their tech teams in the first half of 2018. Still, you might be wondering if your developer hiring can make an impact on the entire business.

The answer? A resounding yes. This post will walk you through a few of the ways that your tech recruiting success can (and should) affect your company.

How would you describe a “technology company?” If you’re like most people, you’d probably think of the typical traits of a tech startup. They’re small, but growing rapidly. They have offices that would make people envious, complete with amenities like catered lunches and refrigerators full of beer. But above anything else, technology companies sell software, right?

That might have been true in years past. But today, we live in an age where every company is a technology company. Todd Hazelton, Technology Product Editor at CNBC, recently wrote that the term “tech” has almost become meaningless. He adds, “Any company that starts up today has to change the industry it's competing in in order to excel. That comes through clever application of technology.”

So, does this mean that your company is a tech company? The answer is a resounding yes, and to attract the developers you want to hire, you need to embrace the fact that you (yes, you) are recruiting for a technology-driven organization. In fact, this should influence your entire employer branding strategy. Here are a few tips to help you create more effective tech recruitment strategies.

Imagine that you’re in the middle of a search for a UX developer and that you haven’t found “the one” just yet. At the same time, we’ll also say that your company has an excellent reputation in the software development community. On top of that, you also have quite a few applications waiting in your inbox.

Things are looking good in this scenario, right? Absolutely! But the temptation here would be to celebrate these accomplishments by slowing down your technical recruitment efforts—which would be a huge mistake.

We’re not suggesting that you should hire a candidate just for the sake of ending a search. In fact, our CEO Joel Spolsky says that each developer that you interview should meet with at least six people before you make a final decision. But things like passive candidate recruitment and employer branding should always be a priority, even when your talent acquisition strategy seems to be working. Why is this the case? Let’s take a closer look.

I bet you can think of a few times when you wanted to make a developer a job offer, but needed the executive team needs to sign off first. How frustrating is it when that happens? Still, the reality is that C-level executives should be involved in the hiring process, especially when it comes to selecting the right developers. The challenge for you is understanding how much of their input is appropriate. After all, it would be ill-advised to ignore their wisdom just for the sake of filling open technical roles.

But how do you figure out how to effectively involve your C-suite in technical hiring decisions—and how do you manage everyone’s expectations?

While hiring the best talent is an integral part of any successful business, it’s becoming even more crucial for CTOs to hire the right employees for their technical team. Hiring the right – or wrong – employee doesn’t just have an effect on your employee morale, it has a large impact on your company’s bottom line. In a world where new programming languages are being invented every month, you never know which of your next hires could become the creator of the next Swift or Go.

Whether it’s getting your product to market before competitors or retaining the best technical talent to avoid the costs of turnover, here are a few ways hiring has an effect on your bottom line.

A key to being a successful recruiter is thinking proactively. This often means forecasting hiring needs weeks (if not months!) in advance so you can begin to build talent pipelines for those planned openings. But if your organization is expecting to see a rapid growth in headcount, it’s also important to be proactive even earlier on in the process: You need to ensure that you’ll have enough recruiters to fill those positions.